Are the children of today's society becoming desensitised to violence, horror stories and brutality? Are they becoming less inclined to fear the unknown and just jump head first into anything that comes their way?
Talking to children of the age of ten about the situation of life in the developing world, I was surprised to hear their feed back and comments. These children turned round to me and said that the advertisements on TV no longer shock them enough to want to help. They see the ad's and if they are at all moved by them they simply change the channel so as not to watch. They figure that these are all somebody else's problems. Someone else should deal with it. When asked about war they all had stories to tell about how they had seen James Bond do this and blow up that, how they had all seen the latest war movie in the cinema and had loved it. I asked what was their favourite part in the movies they all said the explosions. I then asked them if they thought of how the people in the war might feel, or how they would feel if they were in a war and they just shrugged it off and said “We are a neutral country it'll never happen.” Again this repeated their ideals that it was somebody else's problem for somebody else to deal with.
In another group of children also of the age of 10 to 11, they were asked a series of questions for discussion on the topic of drugs. I was appalled at the amount of information which they knew and all from just watching TV and movies. These kids however were not phased in the slightest by the fact that all these drugs could do to them and not one turned round at the end of the discussion to say, well I'm certainly never doing them! Yet all hope is not yet lost as the same group of children were given the topic of sex to discuss. Each child at the end of that discussion were horrified by the fact that pregnancy is not the only negative outcome of unprotected sex.
These studies show that the children of the 21 st century are becoming desensitised to violence against their own species. Yet when asked about violence to animals each child was appalled at the mere thought of it.
These discussions were carried out with two different groups of children each ranging from the ages of 10 to 13.
